Dear Darren, I feel your pain. Thank you for sharing your thoughts as many comments have been from Scrum lovers. I think you’re the first person to express how I felt so many times as team member during Scrum implementations (as opposed to the coach or Scrum Master).
You are touching on a topic that I haven’t talked about much yet but feel very passionate about. In my (possibly controversial) view, Scrum is a management tool using some of the principles of Lean manufacturing. However, it misses the crucial part of why Lean Manufacturing works (and why Modern Agile is becoming more popular each day), which is that it is built on a culture of trust and empowering people (making people awesome). Scrum’s goal seems to be to manage the fragmented parts of the creative process (a very orange control-and-manage-paradigm), whereas Lean’s goal is to manage the entire flow and the results (a teal approach to organizational development).
In my opinion management and agile are contradicting terms. However, where I see Scrum being the “golden bullet” is when you use it as a transition and starting point towards becoming agile. It’s just a stepping stone. One foot is still in the old (orange) manage-and-control paradigm, one foot in the new (teal) lean, whole, organic and free creation process. In itself it’s not bad, it just shouldn’t (in my opinion) be viewed as the end point that will make you agile, but rather the start point to mark your transition towards a more agile organization.
I’ve written about that in another (short) post.
